Page 287 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 275

Who needed Egypt?
“A beer sounds right,” Louisa said. “Stop calling that girl in the
ticket booth. Her job is bad enough without you.” Her housecoat
opened as she pulled the metal can cold from the refrigerator, stabbed
it with a green-handled opener. The beer bubbled up over the can.
She threw the opener into the drawer, picked up the beer, and savor-
ing her foamy fingers, bumped the drawer closed with her hip.
“Want one?” she asked. She sidled over to the kitchen table.
“What you reading?”
“Big test tomorrow. Chaucer.”
“Aw, you’ll do good in it.” She nudged my shoulder. “More’s the
pity.”
“What?”
“More’s the pity. All your brains and nothing to show for it. No
money. No fun. No girls. All for a big fat report card.”
“For now.”
“You’re not like my three boys.”
She was a famous conversationalist in her family. Often I chose
not to study in the attic so she could trap me in the kitchen where
I listened to her, all the while moving my pencil across my yellow
legal pads of notes. She always sat up, late and alone, the nights of
that winter and spring. She wanted to talk. She was interested in the
scar of vocation not yet closed on my skin. She wanted to rub her
finger across it. She knew I was an open wound pretending I was a
brave boy.
Joe Bunchek peered into the kitchen. His bare feet padded across
the scrubbed linoleum. Like a little boy himself he wore jersey paja-
mas, maroon, that in walking made prominent the loose sway of his
equipment which was the constant center of Louisa’s comedy patter.
“Get those big old things away from me,” she said to him.
“Haven’t you caused enough trouble?”
“Listen here, Queenie, lay off the beer. That’s the sixth one since
supper.” They often quarreled openly for sport. Joe could only beat
Louisa by silence. Too often he forgot to use his best weapon.
“Joe Blow, do you have to watch everything I do?”
They both acted like I was an invisible audience invited into

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